Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Page 21

  Eyes sparkling. Snow in their hair.

  Kodak moment.

  Right now they were quarreling. I drank my coffee, drank up the last slurp, the dregs, got up and walked toward the exit, placed the carrier bags filled with presents for Mother and Father and Jørn at his feet.

  “There you go,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Lighten up, squirt,” I said, and went out.

  It had stopped snowing, or hadn’t begun yet, not easy to say.

  I stood there at a loss for a moment, before I went back in and over to information, told them I had missed my plane, that the bus hadn’t come. That I was stranded.

  “There aren’t any flights before Wednesday,” she said. “Next week.”

  “I know,” I answered. “I didn’t catch Christmas this year. It came a bit suddenly, don’t you think?” She looked at me. Not understanding what I meant. But she smiled, and she had such white teeth. Perhaps she stood in front of the mirror every night and polished and polished the enamel with an iron file, as the tears ran.

  “But do you have somewhere to stay? For Christmas, I mean,” she asked. She cared. Or perhaps she was just being nice, worried she might find me frozen stiff in the parking lot, worried she’d have me on her conscience.

  “I have a factory where I can stay,” I answered. “In Gjógv.” And that might not have been the right answer. She looked at me sadly.

  “It looks like you might not be on your own. The flight to England probably won’t leave because of the weather. So …” She hesitated, a little shame-faced about saying it: “Perhaps you could ask somebody here if they could help you with somewhere to stay. There are lots of friendly people around.”

  “Yes, and so many pleasant Englishmen,” I answered. “But I’ll manage. Things will be fine. They’re a lot better than they were.”

  “Oh, really? There aren’t many people living out at Gjógv anymore, are there.”

  “Barely any,” I answered.

  She tapped away on her keyboard, back and forth, staring nearsightedly into her computer screen, as if there might be a minuscule departure she’d overlooked.

  “No,” she said mostly to herself, and shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Merry Christmas, then.”

  “Sure,” I answered. “Merry Christmas.”

  I went back to the souvenir shop at the other end of the departure hall, bought a postcard with a picture of Tórshavn on it, so they wouldn’t think I lived somewhere without stores. Wrote my parents’ address on the back, with a few short sentences saying I hadn’t been able to make it home for Christmas after all. Wrote that I was fine. That there was nothing to worry about. Wrote Merry Christmas. Wrote Happy New Year. And love from Mattias. Still on the island that can’t sink. I don’t quite know why I wrote the last sentence, perhaps because there was just enough space.

  Then I took the bus back to the harbor, sat in the Burger King at the SMS Shopping Center, ate a Christmas burger, the Whopper had gained an extra ounce in honor of Christmas, for the same price. But they didn’t have a Christmas drink.

  The wind was blowing sideways when I came out, it was dark, and it was Little Christmas Eve. The store was closed, so I got my shopping done at the Statoil gas station up in Hoydalsvegur, before I went back down to the town center and sat in the bus shelter, like an obedient dog, waiting for the bus to Gjógv. Rummaged in my suitcase, opened a bottle of Fanta, a chocolate bar, Merry Christmas, and it was cold, I had summer shoes on, my fastest sneakers, and a jacket that was way too thin, but the bus was on time, and the driver looked jolly as I got on, I don’t know why. Sat right behind him, drank my Fanta, and wondered whether to ask him about Ennen, to ask whether he knew who she was, but didn’t. Do not disturb the driver, it said. And I did as I was told.

  Got off the bus at Gjógv, it turned and drove straight back to where it had come from, whizzed up the slope behind me and gathered speed around the bends. I was already wet as I rounded the corner and saw the Factory, I was walking into the wind and it was raining horizontally into my mouth, cold rain with ice at the edges, hard rain, and the Factory was dark, only its outside lights on. Noticed that I started walking faster, automatically, that I held my bag a little tighter, even though I knew there wouldn’t be anyone else there, that they’d already left the day before, that it was going to be a long week.

  Alone.

  Without food.

  Without people.

  Christmas. Rain. Snow.

  I stood in the middle of the kitchen. Everything was so quiet. Empty. A day for singing, with no audience. It was as though a thin layer of dust had settled on the table during the course of the day. I stood there in semi-darkness, flicked the light switch on the wall, light flared over the kitchen counters. I’d have liked it if I’d just woken up in my room upstairs, listening to noises coming from downstairs. People. Not even the rats and children had followed me out of town.

  2

  Afternoon. Evening. Darkness. I sat in the huge living room, in front of the TV, watched the news without taking much in, and the telephone rang on the first floor. I knew who it was.

  Dad was calling.

  Dad had gotten up from his sofa in Stavanger, he’d stood in front of the telephone on the hallway table, looked at the note stuck on the mirror, dialed the number, and it was ringing in Gjógv.

  I got up from my chair, went into the hallway, up the stairs, turned on the light in the corridor and went into Havstein’s office, where the telephone was, but before I could reach it, the ringing stopped.

  I could see Dad before me in Stavanger, standing next to the telephone in the hallway, Mom at his side, leaning toward him, as though she thought she’d be able to hear me, even though I hadn’t picked up the receiver, as long as she could get close enough to the phone. Minutes passed. I didn’t call back. Then he called again, I lifted the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Mattias?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “What happened, Mattias? I was waiting for you at the airport.”

  “I missed the plane.”

  “What do you mean? You missed it?”

  “There isn’t always another bus … That’s just what they’d have us believe.”

  I could hear Mom in the background, even though she didn’t make a sound, I could still hear her anyway.

  “I waited for ages at the airport, Mattias, until everyone had collected their luggage. I had to go to the desk, ask to see the passenger list. Your name wasn’t on it.”

  “I got there ten minutes late. It can happen to the best of us,” I said.

  “But why didn’t you leave a little earlier, Mattias?”

  “It wasn’t me that was late. It was the bus that was early.”

  “But,” he took the plunge, “when are you coming home, then?”

  I decided there and then.

  “I don’t know. Not for a while, I think.”

  “But Mattias—”

  And I interrupt him and say Dad, you should come up here some time, you’ve got to come and look at the sea, there’s sea for you here, Dad, I say, distracting him, and he says that he really should, without a doubt, he must take a trip over, and we make vague plans and both of us know that he’ll never show up, not because he doesn’t want to, but it’s the kind of thing that never happens, he’s got a job to take care of and he hasn’t been anywhere without Mom for years, over twenty years, and he isn’t much of a traveler, likes it best where he is, and I say he must come up here for a trip, I say it many times, and he tells me he will, we make vague plans and they’ll all come to nothing, and we both know it, because I’m his son and my life is so distant from his at this moment, and he thinks that if he were to do it, if he were to come, he’d be an intrusion in my life and be in the way and that I’d be embarrassed when I see him, when I introduce him to the people I spend my time with, but it isn’t true, and I don’t know how to tell him, that it
isn’t true, that I want him to come, that there’s nothing I want more than that he should come and visit me here, see how I’m living, and then Dad disappears and Mom takes over the receiver.

  “Mattias? When are you going to come home? When’s the next flight?”

  “Not until well after Christmas.”

  “I see, okay, but—but are you going to come then? Home? For New Year?”

  “No,” I said. I said it more shortly than I’d expected to.

  “We’ve missed you a lot, Mattias. We wish you’d come home.”

  I was missed.

  I was wanted.

  I was elsewhere.

  I was a fax someone had forgotten to send on an all important Friday. An appointment that went down the chute.

  “Is there any snow back at home now?”

  “Do we have snow, here? In Stavanger? No …”

  “Thought not.”

  “Why not?”

  “It hardly ever snows in Stavanger. Not surprising, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “So who’s coming over? For Christmas?”

  “There’s, there’s the usual. Your aunts, Uncle Einar, Grandma.”

  “How old do you think Grandma is now?”

  “How old? I don’t really know. Old.”

  “Grandma worked at Ellingsen Foto until she retired, didn’t she?”

  “Yes …”

  “Took pictures of people, developed photographs.”

  “Yes, she did. She was a very skilled photographer, your grandma.”

  “But there are no more than a couple of photographs of her, maybe. Almost none.”

  “Maybe so. I guess so. Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing. It’s funny the way things end up.”

  “Why are you talking about this?”

  “I don’t know. Just came to me.”

  “When are you going to come home? Are you coming for New Year?”

  “No. I think I’ll be staying here for some time.”

  “But do you have money? And your apartment, what will we do with it? Your dad’s paying the rent every month, but he can’t keep doing that forever. You’re welcome to stay with us for a while.”

  “Everything’s fine. You don’t need to worry. I’ve got money. I’ve got a job here. I don’t think I’ll be needing the apartment. You can probably just give my notice.”

  “So you’ve got a job, what kind of job?”

  “First I was making sheep. Wooden sheep. For the tourists. But now I’m a gardener again.”

  “Sheep out of wood?”

  “They’re very nice. I can send you some.”

  “I wish you’d phone more often at least.”

  “I sent a card.”

  “What?”

  “I sent a card. A Christmas card. But it doesn’t have a Christmassy picture on the front. Doesn’t have quite the right seasonal feel, maybe. But anyway.”

  I could hear her giving up.

  “I’d better be going now, Mattias, if I’m going to have the scrambled eggs and speke-ham ready in time—and Vidar Lønn-Arnesen’s special is on TV soon, we always watch that, you know … so …”

  “Merry Christmas, then,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I’d be here alone.

  “Merry Christmas, Mattias,” she answered. “Take care of yourself.”

  I lowered the receiver, placing it back in its cradle, and in the instant before it clicked into place I could hear Dad, in the background, wishing me a Merry Christmas, but I didn’t manage to answer, didn’t manage to wish him a Merry Christmas, before the connection was broken. And I didn’t really want to call him back, just to say that.

  And so there I stood. In Havstein’s room. My shoes on. Without plans. Christmas Eve, 1999.

  So what do you do? Watch TV? Make a good dinner? Sing Christmas songs to yourself in an echoing room? There aren’t any handbooks for people spending Christmas alone. Only TV guides. Ready-made dinners.

  Havstein’s room. The Office. A large desk in the middle. Solid wood, of course. This was where the telephone was. Two chairs turned toward the table. Twelve big filing cabinets side by side against the wall. The bookshelf behind the desk. Another one against the opposite wall, by the door into his bedroom. Havstein had furnished his room like the films he’d seen. It was like a stage set in here. The Psychiatrist’s Office.

  Which might have been why I spun around and walked to the first and best filing cabinet and pulled out a drawer. Because I expected to find it empty, for all the drawers to be empty. Or filled with blank paper. But they weren’t. The drawers were filled to the brim with papers, and the papers were filled with text: neat, handwritten notes, almost illegible comments scrawled in pen, and endless pages of typewriting. This was the great archive. The great drain. Detailed journals on everybody Havstein had met over the years. Everybody that had ever lived at the Factory, or patients from all over the country, collected together, not easy to say. They were all in here somewhere, Ennen, Anna, and Palli, logged and with notes that aimed at understanding. I knew I shouldn’t look. I should close the drawer, go back downstairs, sit in a chair, watch TV, get into Christmas mood, find a beer in the fridge, eat nuts. Pack presents I hadn’t bought. Call a friend. But I can turn thief, I can have the longest nose around, I can sniff my way to you blind, open every cupboard and drawer, let the skeletons tumble out so they cover the entire floor.

  I was at it again. I wasn’t to be trusted.

  I lifted some bundles out.

  Began leafing through the papers, going through the drawers, hundreds of journals, of varying length. See attachment 1-9, see photograph 2F, see accompanying CT-transcript. See it all. And I saw.

  I sat in Havstein’s chair with heaps of journals, read and leafed through countless admissions, discharges and re-admissions, eternal revolving-door patients and others who’d been cured, who’d left the clinic one day and never needed to walk through its doors again, people who were out there, getting by, who looked like anybody else. The pilot of a plane coming here. The captain of the boat. The woman who makes your bed in the hotel. The woman who delivers your mail without reading it first. The man who makes sure your boat will float. They might be anybody at all.

  And then, among them all, I found what I was looking for.

  No. 12.VMF.82/05/32914/1-15.04.1980

  Poulson, Palli Jóannes. Pers. ID: Born March 12 1962. Signabøur, Kollafjør∂ur. First adm. April 15 1980 on req. of par., and . On adm. patient 18 yrs, not in a rel. no previous hist. of ment. ill. Uncle on father’s side schiz., . Pat. childhood appears adequate, gen. good, father fisherman, away long per. during childh., stay at home mother. Childh., see Appdx. 1. Pat. went to sea age 17, sailed in foreign vessels, but had probl. settling down on any of them, worked on 6 ships during this per. Often exp. fatigue, low concentration, several casual sex. rel. when ashore. Returned from sea age 18, par. think they detect some sympt. from that time. Moved home, insomnia, restlessness, lack of initiative (progr.), complained that the neighbors were out to get him, that they controlled his thoughts and broadcast them to ships he had worked on. This has incr. rec., Lately pat. unable to eat reg. Believes food poisoned by neighb. and family, complains of threatening voices. Interv. 1, acts calmly, adqu. groomed, adqu. cooperative, does not interrupt and usually answ., though answ. short and incompl. Pat. adm. to clin. dept. Tórshavn, 8 wks, medic. neurolept. Klorpromazin (Hibanil) (…) Pat. adm. 2nd time, Jul 2 1980, following interrupted treatm. (Pat. discharg himself, went home to parents, reassured them on improvement), cont. treatm. with therapy and Klorpromazin for 11 months after satisf. impr. in sympt., (see appdx 2) (…) Pat adm. 6 times, now with longer per. of partial/near complete rem. Adm. 6. 6/12/1989, Pat has rec. (approx 4 yrs) functioned satisf. in own apartment with weekly visits, light work at harbor, described as easy going. Adm. due to slight det., treated with low dose Haloperidol 2mg, 12 weeks. Transf. aftercare Gjógv under Dr. Havstein Gar∂ali∂ 7/13/1989, near compl. remission, cont. tr
eatm. w low dose neuroleptic or sim. on det. ICD-10 F20.x3. (sign.)

  No. 33. FHTYE.82/530/1929/7-22.01.1989.

  Anna Kambskar. Pers. ID: Born June 17 1965. Mivagur. Adm. first t. Jan 22 1989, upon req. of father, . Pat. is on adm. a 24 yr. old female, unmarried. She is clear abt. time/place and current sit. During conv. alternates betw. despair, anger and apathy. Pat. seems suspicious, answ. Psych’s qus more or less fully. No prev. adm., but conv. with parents indicates two siblings w sim. cond. Childh. partially stressf. Pat. descr. as introvert and over-sensitive, but helpful. (See Appdx. 1). Childh 0-16. Dur. period 18-22 pat. empl. at the post off. in Ei∂i, where she claims to have felt at ease with tasks and colleagues. At 23, laid off without warn. due to restructuring, moved to Tórshavn. Exp. diffic. in leaving her community and friends, in her pres. environ. she has only been able to estbl. friendship with one pers., an old classmate she met by chance. Hist. outlined below supported by pat. and parent. First sympt. traced back to Nov 1988 and indicates incr. degr. of disquiet, dissoc. probl., conv. sympt., feels that “someone” (non-spec) is out to get her, descr. voices that communic. with each other that she receives by mistake. The voices belong to sailors that are planning to kill her. Father also descr. visual halluc./delusions he was told by pat., who is unable to recog. these as delusions. In the main these concern “dead seamen who stomp around in my kitchen in the day, stand next to my bed at night whispering, and dripping with water.” (pat. own expl.) The constant pres. of these imagined beings results in fear of mov. outside house, fear of eating, sleeping etc. The spec. episode leading to adm. on Jan 21 1989, pat. att. suic., discovered by a friend, who came to visit at her res. in . Together with par. she was transp. to em. clinic at hosp. in Tórshavn, transf. to this clinic follow. morn. Instg. treatm. with anti-psych. and psych. therapy, treatm., 4 weeks. (…) 2/19/89: Init. diagn. Ganser syndr. (ICD-09 F44.80), this is now repl. by React. Psych. with schiz.sympt. A cond. the causes of which we know rel. little about, but indications are biol. fact. may have greater sign., in conj. w cerebral bio-chem. reactions. Conv. w pat. and parents reveals that on the day bef. suicide att. the pat. attended an exhib. together w where they saw paintings by the Faroese artist Samuel Mikines. Acc. to the painting Returning from the funeral esp. caught the att. of the pat., which acc. to made a strong impression on her. This ep. may be the trigger for the timing of the ep. even if it is too early to say if the ep. was the main trigger in isol., but cf. poss. supp. by research by French prof. of psych. Hérve Muller (cf. Séance de rêve éveillé, 1984). Pat. treat. w neuroleptica (Klorprotixen). Compl. 8 months. 9/03/1989, pat. discharged, weekly obs. Satisf. remission. See appx. A. 3/7/1990, det./relapse, adm. 3 months (Appx B) 9/16/1990, adm. 5 months (Appx. C). 11/29/1991, adm. neur./psych, 7 months, transf. 2/08/1993 Aftercare in Gjógv under Dr. Havstein Gar∂ali∂, appar. compl. remission. ICD-10 F23.1 / F23.2.